Glossary
AI interviewer
An AI interviewer is software that conducts an interview on an employer’s behalf, asking the questions, managing time and, in many tools, asking follow-ups and producing a scored write-up.
“AI interviewer” covers a range of tools. At one end are chatbots that ask a few text questions and check boxes. At the other are voice agents that hold a spoken conversation, follow up on vague answers and write up what they heard against a set of skills.
What an AI interviewer does
- Asks your questions, either word for word or as a starting point for conversation.
- Keeps time, so a 15-minute interview stays 15 minutes.
- Follows up when an answer is thin, if the tool supports it.
- Records and transcribes the conversation.
- Assesses the answers against the skills you define, often with a score per skill.
What it shouldn’t do
It shouldn’t make the hiring decision. It also shouldn’t judge things unrelated to the job, like facial expressions, tone of voice, background or how “confident” someone looks. Those signals are weak predictors of performance and easy ways to encode bias. A sound setup follows a simple split: the AI prepares, the human decides.
An example
A startup hiring five sales development reps sets up an interview with four skills: prospecting research, handling objections, written follow-up and resilience. The AI interviewer runs the conversation with each of 120 applicants over a week. The founder reads the top 25 write-ups, checks the evidence quotes, watches a few recordings and invites 10 people to a call.
Questions to ask a vendor
- What exactly is scored, and what isn’t?
- Can I see the reasoning and evidence behind every score?
- Can I override any outcome, and is that recorded?
- How are candidates told they’re talking to an AI?
- Does language, accent or grammar affect scores?
- Is candidate data used to train models?
- What happens when the audio is poor?
How it differs from interview note-takers
Some AI tools sit in on interviews run by people and take notes. They help the human interviewer. An AI interviewer replaces the interviewer for one round, usually the first, so the team’s time goes to later rounds. See how AI interview scoring works for more on the assessment side.